The definition of “Wrong”

It’s not as cut and dry as you might realize.

Do you suffer from a disease? Do you have problems with impulse control? Do you have some sort of cognitive impairment? Do you have compassion?

These are four totally out of the normal questions to ask but I believe that they are totally apt for this. The definition of right and wrong is pretty easy to understand. You have an understanding of something being right or wrong? Is it right for someone who broke the law to be punished under said law You can only answer yes or no to that question.

If you have an understanding of the definition between right and wrong you always answer yes. So based on that question and your answer you believe that someone stealing food from a store to feed their starving children should go to jail for shoplifting. 
 
Some of you are starting to say to yourself, or even aloud, well not in that case. In that case you have compassion because it is said that they are trying to feed their starving family, but as you were told, they did steal. The compassion you have for someone changes not whether stealing is right or wrong, but whether giving them the same punishment is right or wrong.

What makes something right or wrong for an individual is whether it feels right or wrong. Is someone breaks a law to protect themselves or their loved ones as in the case of the food stealing we become compassionate. We even have laws set up to make sure that in certain circumstances breaking a certain law is ok. It is ok to physically harm or even kill someone if you believe they mean to harm or kill you or your loved ones. Its called self defense and when it comes to physical harm from someone else it’s a huge defense.

I believe this can also play a part with people who have impulse control, a cognitive impairment or a disease such as an addiction. I am not an expert on either of these topics but being a former porn addict who suffers from seasonal depression and OCD I would say I have some incite in to the subject.

As a former porn addict I used to categorize pics of people and just keep them in folders. More of an archive that anything I would say. I would spend the normal amount of time masturbating that anyone who calls them self a porn addict would say but other than that I would say that there were days when I would spend more that 10 hours just going through pictures and downloading them and putting them in the proper folders.

Not being a practicing addict anymore I don’t do this at all with anything. There are times though that I do get obsessive with downloading music. I try my hardest, most of the time, to stay away from anything that is going to have bad album artwork so my genre of choice is almost always CCM or Christian Contemporary Music. But there have been times that I would spend a few hours downloading them and adding them to iTunes to have them added to iTunes Match to make sure that they were on all of my devices so no matter where I wanted to listen to them I could. Thats even if I did listen to them.

As a man who has been saved and loves praise music listening to CCM isn’t wrong. It’s very right actually for me getting closer to God through worship and praise and helping in my everyday recovery from the effects of my addiction but the way I went about it with the obsessive actions and the amount of time spent is very very wrong. You can’t replace one obsession with another no matter how healthy it is. At least I can’t.

So to me the definition of Right and most importantly Wrong is whether it feels Right or Wrong.